Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A simple model of flame merging in mass fires is examined for fuel beds placed in a regular array. The model leads to an estimate of the critical conditions at the onset of merging which is in agreement with the scanty data available. The theory indicates that the critical conditions expressed in terms of the flame height, fuel bed separation and size, are independent of the number of fires except insofar as the number determines the flame height, and a simple means of visualizing the effect of increasing numbers is given.